Enlightenment Now Quotes

“You might have to spread-eagle while a guard slides a wand up your crotch, you may have an elbow in your ribs and a seatback in your chin, but long-distance lovers get to see each other, and if your mother gets sick you can be there the next day.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What’s good for humanity is not always good for social science, and it may be impossible to unsnarl the bundle of correlations among all the ways that life has improved and trace the causal arrows with certainty.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.54”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”: The”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Welzel grouped the ninety-five countries in the World Values Survey into ten zones with similar histories and cultures.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The World Opinion Poll and Pew Global Attitudes Project have each found that more”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Other surveys show the same shifts.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of people.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though geologists can’t yet predict earthquakes, they can often predict volcanic eruptions, and can prepare the people who live along the Rim of Fire and other fault systems to take lifesaving precautions.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times [in 1974, which is more than double the per capita rate today—SP].45”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Half of the world’s homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity, and”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“But in 2014, Eisner, in consultation with the World Health Organization, proposed a goal of reducing the rate of global homicide by 50 percent within thirty years.15”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“for manipulating the atmosphere and oceans”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Other ideas”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Why should the laws of nature have allowed exactly one physically possible way of satisfying a human desire, no more and no less?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common elements.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“No sooner did Obamacare pass than the Republican Party made it a sacred cause to repeal it, but each of their assaults on it after gaining control of the presidency in 2017 was beaten back by angry citizens at town-hall meetings and legislators afraid of their ire.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off, and positively depraved to conclude that one may as well not try to improve Seema’s life because it might improve her neighbors’ lives even more and leave her no happier.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.4”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In her article “The Feminist Side of Sweatshops,” Chelsea Follett (the managing editor of HumanProgress) recounts that factory work in the 19th century offered women an escape from the traditional gender roles of farm and village life, and so was held by some men at the time “sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In 18th-century England this cronyism gave way to open economies in which anyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations, and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If agricultural efficiency had remained the same over the past fifty years while the world grew the same amount of food, an area the size of the United States, Canada, and China combined would have had to be cleared and plowed.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“That bias is built in because of the asymmetry of time: there is a nonzero probability at any moment that we will be felled by an unpreventable accident like a lightning strike or landslide, making the advantage of any costly longevity gene moot.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“But the fact that experts’ assertions about maximum possible life expectancy have repeatedly been shattered (on average five years after they were published) raises the question of whether longevity will increase indefinitely and someday slip the surly bonds of mortality entirely.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress